Friday, October 26, 2012

A Spaniard with an
indelible accent, he commanded revolutionary troops in the Escambray mountains,
turned against the Revolution and took up arms against it, spent 22 years in jail,
was freed and went abroad only to become the rare opponent of the Cuban
government to return to Cuban soil in 2003 to oppose it through civic
means.That last political initiative
never took off, and he seems to have lived quietly in Havana ever since.He died there yesterday.Herald story here.

Cuba’s election process is under way, with the first round
of municipal elections completed.Elections to provincial bodies and to the National Assembly follow.The National Assembly then selects from its
members a Council of State and its president, the country’s chief executive.

Electoral officials report that 7.3 million votes were cast
in the first round, of which 4.8 percent were left blank and 4.4 percent were “declared
null.”See Cuban media reports here in English
and Spanish.AP analysis here.

The process lacks suspense, to say the least.Looking ahead to the round of elections that
will follow Raul Castro’s second and final term in 2018, the Catholic lay
magazine Espacio Laical editorializes
that Cuba should do better, and the Cuban Communist Party must modernize by
creating “a new electoral model that can guarantee a greater exercise of
popular sovereignty.”

At that moment, the editorial says, the Party “will no
longer count on historic leaders of the Revolution who may have, for some
social sectors, a certain original legitimacy.”It’s time to get started now to create a model where votes are “free,
secret, and direct,” where “various proposals” are on the ballot, where
aspirants may present their platforms to the public, where some candidates may
not be Communist Party militants and may have a “different
political-ideological vision.”This
task, the editorial argues, is “indispensable to assure the future stability of
the nation.”

These issues were the subject of a public forum convened by
the Catholic Church, covered here by
La Jornada.

As cleanup efforts begin,
Cuban civil defense authorities announce
11 fatalities caused by hurricane Sandy’s pass through Santiago,
Guantanamo, and Holguin provinces in eastern Cuba.Among the dead was a four-month-old who died
in a building collapse.Granma has photos.Reuters story here.

AP: Florida’s
Ethics Commission investigated Rep. David Rivera’s conduct while he served
in the state legislature and found probable cause to believe he committed
11 violations of the law.This is
separate and apart from the investigation of his apparent financing of a
Democratic primary candidate this year to soften up the eventual Democratic
nominee, Joe Garcia.Republicans
continue to keep their distance from Rivera.The Washington Post recently ran
interviews of Rivera
and Garcia.

Steve Johnson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies
has written a chock-full-of-information paper on academic exchanges with Cuba.He recognizes the complications and
argues that a greater degree of exchange is in the U.S. national
interest.Also, that it’s easier to
achieve by private organizations than by the government.

Mambi
Watch has the audio of a speech delivered in Spanish by Senator Rubio
where he predicts that the Cuban government’s end is near.The prediction was based on information
he couldn’t share, he said.He
spoke to Unidad Cubana, many of whose members surely made the same
prediction to each other before Rubio was born.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Rosa Maria Paya, daughter of Oswaldo Paya who died in the car driven by
Spanish activist Angel Carromero and in which Swedish activist Aron Modig was a
passenger, has alleged from the beginning that the car was rammed and driven
off the road by another car.She and
others in Paya’s camp have asserted that there are text messages to that effect
sent from the Europeans’ phones shortly after the accident.In a video statement released by Cuban
authorities just after the accident and later at trial, Carromero made no reference
to another car and said he lost control.In Cuba and back home in Sweden, Modig has said he was dozing at the
time of the accident.

Rosa Maria Paya is now getting more specific, tweeting
that Modig sent a text saying: “Angel says that a car hit us and drove us off
the road.”She complains
that he continues to omit this in interviews even as he says he wants, as she
paraphrases him, “to bring the truth back.”

Paya refers to this
interview that Modig just gave to a Cuban opposition website based in
Sweden, where he continues to say he was “sleeping before the crash.”

Modig, meanwhile, will soon be active
in our own internal affairs as a volunteer for Governor Romney’s campaign in
Virginia.

Monday, October 22, 2012

For about 10 days, skittish
editors around the world sent reporters to chase rumors of Castro’s death.From Caracas, one Nelson Bocaranda claimed
that Fidel’s sister Juanita had been summoned to Havana, which she denied
in an interview with Wilfredo Cancio at Café Fuerte.She said it is “irresponsible to circulate
unfounded rumors” and added that she is “very busy with the campaign for the
re-election of Obama, who is the candidate I like and seems to be the best for
the country where I have lived for 48 years.”

The rumors became more intense and
the editors more skittish last Thursday when the Miami Herald ran a bizarre
story with details of Castro’s purportedly abysmal medical condition presented
by a Venezuelan doctor who resides in Naples, Florida.

The front page of
today’s Granma (pdf) has a photo of Fidel holding last Friday’s newspaper
and a story
with Fidel’s byline (“Fidel Castro is in agony”) denouncing news media “stupidities”
incited by “the henhouse of imperialist propaganda.”More than the photo, that phrase proves he’s
still kicking.

“I don’t even remember what a
headache is,” Fidel wrote.He recalled
the Cuban missile crisis, Cuba’s “ethically unimpeachable” conduct in it, and
he noted that after half a century “we’re still here with our head held high.”He’s finished publishing his reflexiones, he says, because “surely it
is not my role to occupy the pages of our press, which are dedicated to other
tasks that our country requires.”

On Saturday, Wilfredo Cancio examined
how this story, which has sprung up several times in recent years, took off
last week in a new context where anyone can publish anything immediately and worldwide
on social media.In fact, on the day
that the story is true there will be no scoop, Cancio writes, because “it will
be known when Cuba announces it officially.”I agree.I also agree that, as he
writes, it will mark a turning point in Cuban history but “whenever it comes, it
will be less and less transcendent for the course of the country.”

Fidel is still alive and his tongue
is still sharp, but the post-Fidel era has been with us for some years now.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Cuban media announced yesterday a government
decision to end the requirement that citizens who wish to travel abroad obtain
a government exit permit called the tarjeta
blanca.Also eliminated was the requirement
to obtain a letter of invitation from a person or institution overseas, and the
considerable expense associated with both.There are exceptions for health care professionals, security personnel, and
others.Both changes take effect January
14.

This is a very significant move that delivers on a commitment made in
2011. It is a clear improvement in Cuba's human rights practices.

It is also popular, judging from conversations in Cienfuegos yesterday.One man exulted that it removed a barrier
that stops him from visiting his brother and other family abroad.Another would not part with his newspaper
because the news had him “so emotional.”Newspapers were hard to come by.The text of the law, available in post offices, was gone by
mid-morning.A clergyman said it was “the
most awaited change” among all the lifted prohibitions – computers, DVDs, hotel
stays, cell phones, car sales, residential real estate sales. A man running
errands with his daughter described the change simply: “This is a freedom that
has been suppressed for many years, but no longer. Things are changing, more and more.”

The impact will not be massive and immediate because no receiving
country is about to grant massive numbers of visas to Cubans

Finally, the move is a calculated risk on the part of the government,
which opted to grant this freedom even as it copes with emigration of
30,000-40,000 per year that includes many educated professionals.The alternative would have been to wait years
for an improvement in salaries and general economic conditions that would in
turn reduce the incentive to emigrate.Today’s bet seems to be that Cuba will be stronger with a more normal
and modern immigration policy – and that many Cubans, given the freedom to come
and go, want to visit family and see the world and then return home.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

The peace talks between Colombia’s government and the FARC guerrillas will
start in Oslo this week after 31 FARC members, with capture orders against them
lifted by the government, flew from Colombia to Havana last weekend, then on to
Norway (La Republica).The FARC was founded 48 years ago and
Colombia’s is the longest-running guerrilla war in the Americas.

A press conference is scheduled Wednesday.The Oslo meetings are to finalize the agenda
and ground rules, and negotiations will begin formally next month in Havana (El
Colombiano).There have been
contacts between the Colombian government and the ELN guerrillas geared toward
getting that group to join peace negotiations too.

Colombian President
Juan Manuel Santos has declared that he will not enter a cease fire, will not
grant a territorial safe haven to the guerrillas, expects the talks to take “months,
not years,” and will end the talks if they appear to be going nowhere. Last
month, Santos thanked the Cuban and Norwegian governments for their support in
this process, saying: “Without their presence it would not have been possible
to come to this point.”Cuba and Norway
will serve as “hosts and guarantors” in the talks, he said, while Venezuela and
Chile will be “companions.”

The FARC has adopted a
defiant public tone (see this BBC interview
with a timeline of the conflict), although FARC negotiator Marco León Calarcá spoke more seriously in a
two-part interview with La Jornada (here and here).Calarcá said the FARC position is “realistic,” seeking
“possibilities to live and in that context to engage in politics, to be in
opposition without this implying necessarily being a military target.”

In other words, the key for the
FARC is to be able to stop fighting and to engage safely in opposition
politics.That implies negotiating a
ceasefire, integration of FARC fighters into civilian life, and whatever
political and security guarantees are needed to give both parties confidence
that the negotiated arrangements will work.

Success or failure will belong to
the Colombians, but Cuba has a key role and has taken on a serious and
interesting challenge.The fact that
Havana enjoys the confidence of a very
old, faltering Marxist insurgency and a center-right, free-market democracy that
is close to Washington is a big vote of confidence in Cuban diplomacy
and a sign of its prominence in the hemisphere, even in the post-Fidel era.One
can imagine that Cuba’s key contribution could come when the FARC reaches
crunch time and has to decide whether to take the leap into civilian life and
politics – which it will surely call a transition to another form of struggle.

U.S. interests are in play –
humanitarian, security, anti-drugs, and anti-terrorism interests in a country
where our taxpayers have spent $3.5
billion in aid since 2008.

The U.S. government designates
the FARC as a “foreign terrorist organization” whose “tactics include
bombings, murder, mortar attacks, kidnapping, extortion, and hijacking, as well
as guerrilla and conventional military action against Colombian political,
military, and economic targets,” with ties to drug traffickers, and whose
operations occur both in Colombia and in “neighboring countries.”

An end to the conflict and the dismantlement of
the FARC military capacity would result in the removal of that terrorist
designation from the FARC or its successor political organization.Such an achievement would add one more
absurdity to Washington’s continued designation of Cuba as a “state sponsor of
terrorism.”

Monday, October 15, 2012

The sentence came down Monday: Spanish Partido Popular activist Angel
Carromero, who drove the car that crashed and killed dissidents Oswaldo Paya
and Harold Cepero, got four years for vehicular homicide (Los
Angeles Times, Miami
Herald).

El Pais reports that Spain’s foreign ministry “received the news with
moderate satisfaction” and hopes to negotiate Carromero’s prompt return to
Spain, possibly to serve all or part of his sentence there.A 1998 accord between Spain and Cuba allows for
convicts to serve their sentences in their home country when both governments agree.

Friday, October 12, 2012

In Global
Post, Nick Miroff on Cuba’s sigh of relief after last Sunday’s Chavez
victory in Venezuela.

AFP:
New data from the National Statistics Office (see public health section in
right-hand column here) shows
that consolidation and cost-cutting in the health sector are
continuing.There are 12,738
locations for health care delivery – including everything from the biggest
hospital to the smallest one-doctor consultorio
– 465 fewer than before.There are
161 hospitals operating, 25 percent fewer than before.

Reuters
on the foreign executives arrested apparently as part of an
anti-corruption crackdown, awaiting charges for more than a year.

Scientific
American: Looks like an opossum to me, but it’s called an almiquí,
nocturnal
and venomous, endemic to Cuba and thought to be extinct until a team of
Cuban and Japanese researchers found a bunch out east in the Humboldt National Park between Moa and Baracoa.

Granma:
An investigation into last month’s massive blackout finds that the cause
was human error at a time when operators were scrambling to handle peak
demand.

Spain’s
consul general in Havana attended the Carromero trial last week in
Bayamo,pronounced it “clean, open,
and procedurally impeccable,” and said the accused was defended “very
well.”The BBC’s Fernando Ravsberg agrees,
wrote down the defense lawyer’s name in case he ever needs a lawyer, and
described the day-long session here.